The Publics of New Media

This project will study how the digital spheres of communication and production of Web 2.0 can be thought to offer new modes of deliberative publics and thus new democratic potentials and challenges.

Relevant cases could be the Occupy movement or the so-called Pirate Parties, which both contain a number of interesting paradoxes.

While they have their origin in relatively closed, technology-based partial publics (respectively Anonymous and the free software movement based on copy left-philosophy), they can simultaneously also be regarded as movements that experiment with new modes of public deliberation and political engagement in general.

Using new social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as well as traditional mass media they also strongly influence the public of institutionalized parliamentary politics. Thus, they potentially add a large number of new dimensions to the democratic public — both in theory and in praxis.